Isn’t that beautiful, fantastic, wondrous, magnificent? This is from a NASA website which allows you to show and download a Hubble Space Telescope image which was shot on your birthdate.  https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/what-did-hubble-see-on-your-birthday    Give it a go.

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Here’s another picture, a bit more mundane:

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I misread this picture and asked a friend, “Is that saw blade on the wrong way? Shouldn’t the teeth be reversed so that they cut upwards from underneath the wood?”  The way I saw the picture is the saw cutting from left to right. It must have been too late at night or I’d had one too many wines.

Now, in the bright light of day, I’m ashamed to admit that the picture is correct. The saw is shown with the blade facing the camera which means it gets pushed from right to left.

Duh! My mistake.

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Uuuurrrrgh, I went to the shops yesterday and did a fair bit of walking around the shopping centre. Now my left foot, with its excessive pronation, is hurting like hell and I can hardly stand on it. My hips are painful – not the joints, the muscles. My thighs are aching. I could hardly get up out of my chair last night and I still feel very… weak? today.

All this isolation means I’m not getting out walking as much as before and wow, my muscles are deteriorating. I’ve moved the treadmill back a bit to allow for the hi-fi trolley to move to its new location, so the treadmill’s powered up. I’d better start using it more but walking on my left foot is painful.

While writing this I had a burst of nerve pain in my right foot, between the toes, that had me throwing my head back and yelling with the pain. It died away after about 15 secs and is gone now but wow, diabetic peripheral neuropathy! I’m having to take Panadol Osteo which dulls it somewhat.

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I was just talking about a NAS for backups yesterday and a friend has filled me in with his experiences. It’s not as reliable as you might think, was the message. To be sure and certain, you really need two backups, one stored off the premises, that is stored with a relative or a friend. If a thief sees a NAS box, it’s possible they could pick it up as part of the loot in the house. I dunno about that, I think thieves would be satisfied with all my cameras and TV and other stuff that’s more easily saleable before a blank faced computer box. However, once again, all the other things can be replaced, whereas your computer stored images can’t.

Anyway, I’ve just had reason to use my backup software in earnest today. I use a program called Macrium Reflect (I’ve actually paid for three licences in a discount deal – for two desktops and a laptop).

For several years I’ve been keeping a desktop folder called Great Images from the Web on my desktop. Whenever I saw a spectacular or useful image on the web, I copied it to this folder. It’s grown to contain 421 images taking up 750MB approx.

About a week ago I started to make a slide show using the late lamented (the company’s gone bust) Photodex Proshow Producer. This is a fabulously complex program which is fantastically easy to use. It’s one of the best designed pieces of software I’ve ever found. Although the company’s gone bust, the program still works and will continue to do so, so I’m happy to use it.

Usually it’s fantastically stable. I never worried about crashes, it never seemed to. But this week while making this huge slide show with around 300 images it’s been crashing regularly, I don’t know why. I do know how to make it crash, but since the makers have gone away, that’s not much help.

Get to the point, Pete! OK, just now I tried to open my slide show only to find that all the images are not there. The framework of the show is OK, I haven’t lost that, it’s just lost the images. And sure enough, the folder was gone from my Desktop. Gaaaah!

I spent a lot of time going through the Recycle Bin looking for it. I installed two File Recovery programs and searched, with no luck. Gone, phut! Why? How? I’ll never know. One of the crashes must have caused it.

Jeez, I was pretty worried, but then I realised, I have daily backups courtesy of Macrium Reflect stored on another drive. It took a bit of searching but there it was, in the compressed backup from yesterday morning’s 9am backup. Copy the folder to my desktop and I’m back in business. Phew. It pays to back up. Money well spent.

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By the way, some of the former employees of Photodex have taken the software with them to another firm and relaunched it as Photopia Director or Photopia Creator http://photopia.nl/proshow/  They say their new software is better, enhanced. Normally I would have jumped at it and paid for the new program, but they’ve made it into an annual subscription model. It costs around US$129 a year. That’s about A$200 pa! Grrrr. I used to buy the almost annual upgrades but as an existing user I only had to pay about US$79 for each one. That was reasonable, but this model is too much. I think I’ll write to them and say so. (On the other hand, maybe that’s why Photodex went bust, that they didn’t charge enough?)

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There’s a woman on the radio at the moment saying she feels we should be taking photos in this time of pandemic, showing streets and scenes in their deserted state. I agree! This is history being made and deserted streets are a completely new phenomenon. It should be documented. I think it is in the big news sources but we should take our own shots.

Actually now I’ve listened more, she’s talking about taking photos of families in their driveways and posting them online. That’s not of interest to me, but…

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Continuing on from yesterday about my friend Rosco: another thing he’s been doing is offering a slide scanning service, something I’ve been thinking about for years.

Phew, more later, I’ve been writing for too long.